Anyways though, I see video games as impediments to my studying now. They would have only been useful to me before I turned, say, 14. Until I find educational-at-the-academic-level games in the future (and MIT still won't release its Supercharged game to the public), then I'll have to study without them. Heh, I did write a post about a connection between Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and Civilization III.
Lots of flaws may be found with the current communities as described above - I only gained from the gaming community due to my unique circumstances (unusually high motivation, nonconformance to school social groups, lack of knowledge about gifted programs). Besides, games are educational if you want to say, go into the gaming industry/analyze forum communities/analyze pop culture. =P But radical ideas are needed for change of any sort to come, so I don't think anything above is embarrassing.
P.S: games are useless wastes of time if people play them as they are advertised on the game box (as they are usually played). Only a very small and selected minority of them go to online forums, and out of those who go to forums, few actually go into very thoughtful discussions about the game mechanics. AI-Scripting and Random-Map scripting may be the most educational aspects of Age of Empires II by far, and may be inspired by the game, but by that point, it's more scripting than gaming. The history one learns from the scenarios is at a very superficial level - perhaps enough for AP World History, but far less than the level needed for historiography.